


A Splash Of Determinism

by narceus



Category: Jurassic Park (Movies), Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Chaos Theory, Dinosaurs, Ecology, Minor Character Death, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-04-29
Packaged: 2017-12-09 22:19:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/778619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narceus/pseuds/narceus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So, ten years after the Jurassic Park disaster, the pterodactyls escaped from Isla Sorna and started winging their way towards the Costa Rican mainland.</p><p>That was the start of things.</p><p> </p><p>(Inspired by <a href="http://c-is-for-circinate.tumblr.com/post/35102960830/amazonpoodle-scttmccall-teen-wolf-meets">this gifset</a> on tumblr.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Splash Of Determinism

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning, this makes a lot more sense if you have seen all three Jurassic Park movies. And know just enough about chaos theory to remember why Ian Malcom was going on about it all the time, but no more than that. My own knowledge of chaos theory is...spotty. Do not try to use anything Stiles says in here to help you pass a theoretical math class.
> 
> Originally posted to tumblr [here](http://c-is-for-circinate.tumblr.com/post/35412759437/a-splash-of-determinism). Inspired by [this gifset](http://c-is-for-circinate.tumblr.com/post/35102960830/amazonpoodle-scttmccall-teen-wolf-meets).

So, ten years after the Jurassic Park disaster, the pterodactyls escaped from Isla Sorna and started winging their way towards the Costa Rican mainland.

That was the start of things.

Stiles had three panic attacks and more nightmares than he wanted to think about, the week the pterodactyls made the news.  Then they flew off into the jungles of South America and seemingly disappeared.  The ecologists blathered on endlessly about needing expeditions and the hyperfragile rainforest ecosystem, and the rest of the world mostly forgot about it.  Stiles harassed Lydia by email until she agreed to co-author another two papers with him, Lydia had three brilliant ideas and spent an entire ‘working’ lunch discussing her latest shoe purchase and how, as of last June’s issue of  _Inventiones Mathematicae_ , her Erdos number was now officially 2, and neither of them mentioned pterodactyls, Isla Nublar, or Professors Scott and Allison Argent-McCall at all.

..

Two years and half a dozen major hurricanes later, there were reports of populations of large mammals in Nicaragua suddenly dropping rapidly.  The Nicaraguan government was being suspiciously closed-mouthed, but Isaac sent Erica an email about one of his colleagues’ field permits getting suddenly and unequivocally revoked, and Erica promised to look into some of her more…illegitimate channels.

Erica hacks for Interpol, now, because it pays a lot better than getting chased by them, and Boyd really wanted to be able to talk about his fiancee’s job with all his ex-army buddies.  Interpol’s as interested in what’s going on in Nicaragua as Erica is, which makes her even more curious, but it isn’t until she goes down the hall to bug Danny that she finds out it isn’t just jaguars and capybaras going missing.  Nicaragua’s not as good at covering up the deaths of its own citizens as certain South American countries have been in the past, but no tourists have turned up mauled just yet, so nobody north of the Rio Grande cares.

Then a handful of poachers turn up in a market in Managua with the trussed-up bodies of half a dozen juvenile  _Compsognathus_ , and all of the sudden, pterodactyls seem like the least of anybody’s problems.  Erica finds the unreleased photos of what was left of two of the poachers on the Interpol servers.  Stiles isn’t the only one having panic attacks, now.

..

They call Scott and Allison in for a press conference.  Allison fusses over Scott’s tie and Scott fusses over his notes, and Allison makes him promise to let her do most of the talking because it took Scott almost ten years after grad school just to work out how to make it all the way through an undergrad lecture without stumbling or making a little bit of a fool out of himself somehow.  The survivors of Jurassic Park are suddenly in demand on all the talk shows.  Isaac is probably going to leverage five years of funding and another book deal out of this, which is impressive, given that he hasn’t worked on anything older than the Pleistocene since dinosaurs almost killed him as an undergrad, and he refuses to go within a thousand miles of Costa Rica on general principle.

Six months later UN-funded teams find evidence of not only compeys, but  _Ornithomimus_ , two species of pachycephalosaurs, a psittacosaur, and  _Velociraptor_ , in the Central American jungle. A week later, they’re all gathered together in Scott and Allison’s living room, in the same place for the first time in more than eleven years, paleontologists, mathematicians, the lot of them: Scott and Allison, Isaac, Boyd and Erica, Lydia, Stiles…and Derek.

They’ve all aged, Isaac and Erica growing from a couple of college kids to respectable adults, most of the rest of them growing from respectable adults to…older respectable adults, but Derek Hale has barely changed at all.  It’s hard to know what to call Derek.  At worst, he’s Peter Hale’s nephew, heir to the Jurassic Park disaster and half the reason his uncle came up with the idea in the first place, big game hunter and probably a poacher a dozen times over.  At best, he’s the man that saved all of their lives.  Boyd was running security on the island back then, younger and braver and smarter than his boss, more level-headed than any of them, and Boyd’s the reason they all stayed calm enough to make it out in one piece, but Derek’s the one who stormed out into the jungle, armed with impossibly heavy ordinance, the map in his head and his own sense of righteousness, to bring Scott and Isaac and Erica home.

“We need to hunt them down,” Derek says with no introduction.  ”Hale Industries is fully committed to funding whatever efforts it takes to track down and eliminate the dinosaurs on the mainland.”

“So why do you need us?” Scott demands, and Stiles laughs.

“He’s got no idea how to do it,” he says.  ”I’m right, right?  You let the dinos out of the bag, and now you can’t get them back in.  I told you this was going to happen ten years ago.”

“And you were right,” Derek growls, “and now we have to reverse it.”  The rest of the room exchanges glances.

“It’s…really hard to reverse something like this in nature, Derek,” Allison says.  Stiles rolls his eyes.

“Try impossible.  Literally impossible, it is literally not within the realm of human capacity to return a system to its initial starting conditions.  No matter how hard you growl at it.  You introduced a new variable, you changed the course of the entire universe, and why am I not surprised that you’re still arrogant enough to think that the world comes with a reset button?”

“Well, we can still try, though, can’t we?” Scott says.  ”It’s not  _impossible_ impossible.”

Stiles gapes at him, just a little.  ”What did I just…you have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?” he asks.  ”You’re lying every single time you send me an email and say you’ve read one of my papers.”  Scott raises his shoulders sheepishly.

“They’re kind of dense, dude,” he says.  Stiles sighs.

“Please, they’re biologists, they might as well be working in the soft sciences,” Lydia says.  ”You can’t really expect any more from them.”

“Hey!”  The only person in the room who  _doesn’t_  look offended is Derek.  ”I’m a computer scientist,” Erica points out, and Lydia shrugs.

“Anyway, Stiles has a point, even if he’s being deliberately confrontational about it,” Lydia says. “You can’t undo something you’ve done.  Even if somebody hunted down every last egg and dinosaur, they’ll always have been there once.  They’ve already caused damage, changed the way things would have been.  Which  _doesn’t_  mean there’s no point in trying,” she adds, with a level glare for Stiles.  ”Just because we can’t go back doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go forwards.”

“Hale Industries has did a pretty good job of going back in time with those dinosaurs,” Boyd mutters.

“The environment  _should_  revert to equilibrium, if the invasive species get removed soon enough,” Allison says, but she looks a little unsure.

“Like with cane toads,” Isaac agrees, cheerfully enough that one or two people start to look a little more hopeful before Allison’s wince clues them in.

“You’re the only people who’ve ever dealt with the dinosaurs in their own habitats before,” Derek says.  ”You can help  _not_  make this a completely fruitless hunt by sitting down with some of the people Hale Industries is bringing in and giving them tips.   _All_  of you.”

“Hey, if you’re going to fly me out to wherever you train up your jungle SWAT teams, so long as it isn’t actually in Central America, I’m in,” Stiles says.  ”It’s still not going to work.  You screwed up, and I’ll bet you actual money, which mathematicians do not make very much of I might add, that you’re never going to get rid of those dinosaurs again.”

“You’re a fatalist, Stiles,” Lydia scolds, and he rolls his eyes.

“It’s not fatalism, it’s a belief in a deterministic universe that—”

“Oh, please.  You don’t have a model predicting the probabilistic survival of dinosaurs, unless you’ve been waiting to unveil that one until the next conference?  You’re making things up and using math to make the laypeople think you know what you’re talking about again.”

“So, um,” Scott says, raising a tentative hand.  ”Are you two sleeping together yet?”

Stiles flushes red, and Lydia suddenly becomes very interested in the crown molding in Scott and Allison’s living room.  Before Derek can take advantage of the lapse in conversation, Allison smoothly segues into asking Boyd and Erica about their upcoming wedding plans.  They avoid talking about the dinosaurs after that.  They have lives, after all.  People to tease and to care about, papers to publish, classes to teach.  Scars to ignore.

Nobody there really needs Stiles or chaos theory or fancy mathematical models to tell them that, once something’s been changed, it can’t ever change back again.  They have their nightmares to prove that.  No one here’s the same as they were, before the dinosaurs.  Why should Costa Rica be any different?

..

The next summer, after a massive hurricane, the bloated carcass of a 40-foot-long lizard washes up on the coast of El Salvador.  It’s taken this long for Boyd to remember, but he used to have those maps etched into his brain, ten years ago.  The aquarium; he’d figured they were all gone, dried up, or starved to death.

Apparently not.  There are mosasaurs in the Pacific, now, and velociraptors as far north and west as Guatemala.

The ecologists are panicking, Derek Hale is throwing money around left and right, and half a dozen species of large-bodied birds and primates are suddenly more critically endangered than ever.  There are international danger zones set up with wide perimeters around the Central American rainforests, as far south as Columbia and Ecuador.  Humans and velociraptors don’t mix.

..

It’s annoying that Stiles is right, but not particularly surprising.  Lydia strongly objects to the way Stiles uses words like ‘deterministic universe’ and ‘Lorenzian mathematics’ and, oh, ‘chaos theory’ to make himself look like he can tell the future.  Particularly because, usually, the words he’s using actually mean that it’s effectively impossible to predict the future of a sufficiently complex chaotic system from  _any_  given starting conditions.  On the other hand, he is a damn good guesser.  Someday, Lydia is going to force Stiles to act as a test subject for a paper on the human brain’s intuitive modeling capacities.  She’ll let him be third or fourth author, if he’s good.

Four years after the compeys, six and a half years after the pterodactyls, with mounting evidence that dinosaurs have invaded and thoroughly colonized the entire Amazon river basin, Hale Industries gives up on trying to stop any of it.  Derek pours what’s left of the family fortune into cloning efforts that might or might not help to save whatever ocelots and spider monkeys haven’t been eaten already.  International relief efforts strongly suggest that the farmers and shit-poor villagers of inland Brazil invest in some velociraptor-proof fences.

..

The dominoes line up, one by one, and some nights, Derek Hale stares into the bottom of a mostly-empty beer and wishes that his uncle had never heard of chaos theory.  Before Stiles Stilinski and Lydia Martin stepped off a helicopter, ready to pick apart the philosophical implications of the worst-advised theme park in history, Derek never had long jargon math words to express the idea that  _one thing always leads to another._

Derek comes home for Christmas, full of complaints about how leading overfed tourists on hunting safaris for springbok and ostriches was not what he’d planned to do with his life.  Peter gets an idea.  Inevitable.  Peter spent his whole life getting ideas, terrible, destructive ideas, great fun for him and miserable for everybody else around him.

Peter decides that the world needs a little more excitement, a little more awe, and a lot more dinosaurs.  Peter successfully funds an unthinkable revolution in cloning technology in about six years.  Inevitable, again.  Peter always got what he wanted.

Peter establishes Jurassic Park.  Everything remotely possible goes wrong.

Inevitable.

The humans narrowly escape with (most of their) lives: inevitable, they were good tough, smart people, and the survival instinct is the most impressive thing Derek has ever seen in the human race to date.  The international news is all over them from the moment they land back in Costa Rica: inevitable, it’s a story full of dinosaurs.  Derek gives in to the pressure to try and rework the Jurassic Park concept on the mainland: inevitable, because Derek has never in his life had a single idea that didn’t  _suck_.

A  _Tyrannosaurus_  rampages through half of San Diego.  Inevitable.  The whole world prefers to shut Isla Sorna and Isla Nublar away and pretend they don’t exist, rather than deal with the paperwork to get rid of them.  Inevitable.  People keep sneaking back, indulging all their most idiotic and self-destructive wishes to see a dinosaur.  Inevitable.  Something, again, goes horribly wrong.  Inevitable, inevitable, they were all so stupid not to see.  Inevitable.

Life finds a way.  The biggest inevitability Derek has ever seen.

Dr. McCall used to say that, and Stilinski would roll his eyes at the phrasing, but always agreed with him.  Life finds a way.  You can’t keep million-year-old monsters in a cage on an island somewhere and expect them to fade away and die.  If you build monsters, they will escape.  If they escape, you will never tame them again.

Peter was a fucking idiot who deserved what the compeys did to him in the end, and every step of it seems so very clear now.  Derek drains his beer and orders another one.  Inevitable.

..

Some things that happen, in the years following the dinosaur invasion of South America:

Rainforest logging is cut back by 75%.  No crew can safely get into the forest with assurances of getting out alive.

Drug lords and armed guerrilla forces are found in pieces or never found at all.  There’s suspicion that something much larger than  _Velociraptor_  made the crossing from the islands to the mainland, although nobody knows for sure.   _Spinosaurus_  is a little big to be carried over by a hurricane, but nobody ever checked to see if they could swim.

Half a dozen indigenous tribes are—probably—wiped out for good, but not even National Geographic wants to go check.  Ecological expeditions are suddenly un-permit-able.  It’s barely possible to even get a team in to figure out where the dinosaurs might be and where they aren’t.

Stiles, when he hears about it, leans back in his chair and laughs.  ”So human interference with nature finally created a system that humans can’t figure out how to interfere in.  God job, human race.  A plus for effort.  Marks down for sloppy execution, I expect your next self-defeating cycle to be more elegant.”

“Stop gloating and finish grading your finals,” Lydia scolds, wondering yet again just what the starting conditions were that led to her still keeping the idiot around, after all these years.

..

It takes twenty years for Isaac Lahey to end up back on Isla Sorna.  He’s still not sure why he’s there.

He was nineteen, the first time: full of promise and enthusiasm and fear, knowing more about dinosaurs than any undergraduate ever should, ready to follow Professor McCall to the ends of the earth.  And then he did, and it’s taken almost twenty years for him to be able to look at a dinosaur without the spark of terror running up his spine ever since.

He has a tenured professorship in North Carolina, and a well-studied dig site in Colorado where he’s been dealing with mastodon bones for the past eight years.  At least if the mastodons come to life, they’re both vegetarians and mammals.  But he’s back on hell island, now, because somebody has to be.

Scott and Allison didn’t take very many notes ten years ago, last time they were here, but they indicated a much higher density of dinosaurs than Isaac’s seeing now.  Which he expected.  It’s why they’re here.  The organisms have had twenty years to hit some kind of stable equilibrium, to dig out a niche and settle into whatever sort of ecological community they can establish, and not a single person on earth knows what that looks like.

There’s enough barbed wire and reinforced steel around their camp to stop a charging bull elephant, security sensors, panic rooms, and a helicopter landing pad in the middle of the compound, just in case—but Isaac’s hoping they might not need it as much, this time.  The dinosaurs here know their place now, more or less.  They’re not desperate and starving because Hale Industries didn’t think to include the precise species numbers that would be able to survive on the area and vegetation available on the island.  They’re not young and confused, without any parental care to teach them how to be a dinosaur.  They’re just animals, doing what they do.

There’s a small herd of hadrosaurs passing by, just on the other side of the electric fence, and Isaac leans forward in spite of himself to stare.  They’re still beautiful.

There are fifteen of them here, ecologists, mostly, some animal behaviorists, a guy who’s worked extensively on hunting behavior in monitor lizards.  A botanist.  A handful of extremely heavily-armed guards, although not a single one of them leaves the compound without a rifle at least, just in case.

And Isaac.  Because, well, it may be twenty years later, but Isaac’s still forgotten more about dinosaurs than most paleontologists will ever know.  And he’s starting to remember.

..

Scott and Allison live in Washington State for a while, but she gets a job offer as a department chair at UT Austin, and it’s too good an opportunity to pass up.

They’re living in Texas when the first  _Sinosauropteryx_  make it up through Mexico and across the Rio Grande, and Scott’s first instinct is to pack up his wife and their dog and flee as far north as they can go, but…they’re kind of cute.  Feathery.  Entirely fearless of humans.  It takes a few months for the PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE DINOSAURS signs to go up at the local park, near the garbage cans, and the first time Allison sees them she laughs and laughs.


End file.
